Unfolding the ambidextrous effects of proactive and responsive market orientation

Investigating the ambidextrous effects of its proactive and responsive dimension offers a fresh perspective on market orientation. Drawing upon the ambidexterity literature, the author derives hypotheses on the joint effects of combining and balancing proactive and responsive market orientation. He examines his hypotheses with two-wave panel survey data from 167 strategic business units. Using time-lagged performance data and polynomial regression with response surface analysis to overcome limitations of previous studies of ambidexterity, the author finds that the balance between proactive and responsive market orientation has an incremental positive effect on performance beyond their combined effect; that performance will decline less sharply when proactive is higher than responsive market orientation; and that as the level of balance increases, performance will first decrease and then increase. Given resource scarcity, an important and counterintuitive implication of the present study is that balancing proactive and responsive market orientation is as important as their combination.